Often when we use our mobile phones, it's for something fast in the moment. We see a food item we can’t identify, or hear a song lyric, and want to know more—quick answers to quick questions.

So we’re bringing a new feature to Chrome—search from any webpage with just a tap. Since Chrome can see the page you’re searching from, it can give you more accurate search results. For example, just tapping on “America” on the page below shows a search about the movie “Captain America: Civil War”, not the country. Just slide up to see more information—news, cast, images and more.

This is coming to Chrome on Android over the next few days (with Asian language support to follow).

Adobe Flash allows web pages to display rich content—but sometimes that can put a squeeze on your laptop’s battery. So we’ve been working with Adobe to ensure that your experience on the web can be power-efficient as well as rich and interactive—and today, we’re introducing an update to Chrome that does just that.

When you’re on a webpage that runs Flash, we’ll intelligently pause content (like Flash animations) that aren’t central to the webpage, while keeping central content (like a video) playing without interruption. If we accidentally pause something you were interested in, you can just click it to resume playback. This update significantly reduces power consumption, allowing you to surf the web longer before having to hunt for a power outlet.

This feature will be enabled by default on Chrome’s latest desktop Beta channel release starting today, and will be rolling out soon to everyone else on Chrome desktop. If you need to manually enable it, just head to Chrome’s content settings and select “Detect and run important plugin content.”

We'll be rolling out more power improvements in the coming months - stay tuned!

If you're looking forward to catching-up on all the hot TV shows this summer, get ready to binge out with Chromecast. There's a little something for everyone to enjoy, and here are another half dozen apps for your viewing pleasure.

CBS All Access is now casting shows like The Big Bang Theory and NCIS. And for those seeking a little outside inspiration for their summer project, indulge in new HGTV episodes of Property Brothers and Fixer Upper.

EMPIRE fans, we’ve got you covered too. You can now stream the entire first season and catch up before Season 2 starts in the fall, or watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine using FOX NOW, as well as The Americans and Louie using FXNOW.

Finally, check out the streaming service Pluto TV which curates over 100 channels of news, music, sports, web and TV shows, or Haystack—a news app that is tuned specifically to your interests so that you can keep up with current events and happenings around the world.

Note that you may need to sign in with a subscription or participating TV provider account to access some content. Make sure to update your apps and find the latest on chromecast.com/apps.

Posted by Ananda Sen, Business Development Manager and Professional Foot Tapper

In March, we outlined the problems with unwanted ad injectors, a common symptom of unwanted software. Ad injectors are programs that insert new ads, or replace existing ones, into the pages you visit while browsing the web. We’ve received more than 100,000 user complaints about them in Chrome since the beginning of 2015—more than any other issue. Unwanted ad injectors are not only annoying, they can pose serious security risks to users as well.

Today, we’re releasing the results of a study performed with the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Barbara that examines the ad injector ecosystem, in-depth, for the first time. We’ve summarized our key findings below, as well as Google’s broader efforts to protect users from unwanted software. The full report, which you can read here, will be presented later this month at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy.

Ad injectors’ businesses are built on a tangled web of different players in the online advertising economy. This complexity has made it difficult for the industry to understand this issue and help fix it. We hope our findings raise broad awareness of this problem and enable the online advertising industry to work together and tackle it.

How big is the problem?

This is what users might see if their browsers are infected with ad injectors.

None of the ads displayed appear without an ad injector installed.

To pursue this research, we custom-built an ad injection “detector” for Google sites. This tool helped us identify tens of millions of instances of ad injection “in the wild” over the course of several months in 2014, the duration of our study.

More detail is below, but the main point is clear: deceptive ad injection is a significant problem on the web today. We found 5.5% of unique IPs—millions of users—accessing Google sites that included some form of injected ads.

How ad injectors work

The ad injection ecosystem comprises a tangled web of different players. Here is a quick snapshot.

Software: It all starts with software that infects your browser. We discovered more than 50,000 browser extensions and more than 34,000 software applications that took control of users’ browsers and injected ads. Upwards of 30% of these packages were outright malicious and simultaneously stole account credentials, hijacked search queries, and reported a user’s activity to third parties for tracking. In total, we found 5.1% of page views on Windows and 3.4% of page views on Mac that showed tell-tale signs of ad injection software.

Distribution: Next, this software is distributed by a network of affiliates that work to drive as many installs as possible via tactics like: marketing, bundling applications with popular downloads, outright malware distribution, and large social advertising campaigns. Affiliates are paid a commision whenever a user clicks on an injected ad. We found about 1,000 of these businesses, including Crossrider, Shopper Pro, and Netcrawl, that use at least one of these tactics.

Injection Libraries: Ad injectors source their ads from about 25 businesses that provide ‘injection libraries’. Superfish and Jollywallet are by far the most popular of these, appearing in 3.9% and 2.4% of Google views, respectively. These companies manage advertising relationships with a handful of ad networks and shopping programs and decide which ads to display to users. Whenever a user clicks on an ad or purchases a product, these companies make a profit, a fraction of which they share with affiliates.

Ads: The ad injection ecosystem profits from more than 3,000 victimized advertisers—including major retailers like Sears, Walmart, Target, Ebay—who unwittingly pay for traffic to their sites. Because advertisers are generally only able to measure the final click that drives traffic to their sites, they’re often unaware of many preceding twists and turns, and don’t know they are receiving traffic via unwanted software and malware. Ads originate from ad networks that translate unwanted software installations into profit: 77% of all injected ads go through one of three ad networks—dealtime.com, pricegrabber.com, and bizrate.com. Publishers, meanwhile, aren’t being compensated for these ads.

Examples of injected ads ‘in the wild’

How Google fights deceptive ad injectors

We pursued this research to raise awareness about the ad injection economy so that the broader ads ecosystem can better understand this complex issue and work together to tackle it.

Based on our findings, we took the following actions:

Keeping the Chrome Web Store clean: We removed 192 deceptive Chrome extensions that affected 14 million users with ad injection from the Chrome Web Store. These extensions violated Web Store policies that extensions have a narrow and easy-to-understand purpose. We’ve also deployed new safeguards in the Chrome Web Store to help protect users from deceptive ad injection extensions.

Protecting Chrome users: We improved protections in Chrome to flag unwanted software and display familiar red warnings when users are about to download deceptive software. These same protections are broadly available via the Safe Browsing API. We also provide a tool for users already affected by ad injectors and other unwanted software to clean up their Chrome browser.

Most recently, we updated our AdWords policies to make it more difficult for advertisers to promote unwanted software on AdWords. It's still early, but we've already seen encouraging results since making the change: the number of 'Safe Browsing' warnings that users receive in Chrome after clicking AdWords ads has dropped by more than 95%. This suggests it's become much more difficult for users to download unwanted software, and for bad advertisers to promote it. Our blog post from March outlines various policies—for the Chrome Web Store, AdWords, Google Platforms program, and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange (AdX)—that combat unwanted ad injectors, across products.

We’re also constantly improving our Safe Browsing technology, which protects more than one billion Chrome, Safari, and Firefox users across the web from phishing, malware, and unwanted software. Today, Safe Browsing shows people more than 5 million warnings per day for all sorts of malicious sites and unwanted software, and discovers more than 50,000 malware sites and more than 90,000 phishing sites every month.

Considering the tangle of different businesses involved—knowingly, or unknowingly—in the ad injector ecosystem, progress will only be made if we raise our standards, together. We strongly encourage all members of the ads ecosystem to review their policies and practices so we can make real improvement on this issue.

Many people whip out their phones throughout the day to check something quickly—get a weather forecast, check what time the Giants game is, find out who guest starred on Mad Men last night. And that’s true for the many millions of you who use Chrome on iOS, so we’ve made our latest version even faster for the things you do every day.

Just pull down on any page to reload, open, or close tabs with one swipe. Pull straight down to reload, pull down and left to open a new tab, or pull down and right to close a tab.

On iOS 8, you can now add Chrome to your Today View to open a new tab or start a voice search quickly. Here's how.

Searching in the address bar? You’ll now see suggested answers as you type for weather, stocks, unit conversions and more, as well as any URLs you’ve copied to your clipboard.

And finally, you can now use your favorite password manager (1Password, Lastpass and more) to fill out website password fields in a snap.

On April 8, 2014, Microsoft stopped supporting Windows XP. This isn’t just a formality: computers running Windows XP haven’t received security patches in over a year and are facing a number of critical security vulnerabilities. At the operating system level, computers running XP are inherently in danger of being infected by malware and viruses, making it increasingly difficult for Chrome to provide a secure browsing environment. That’s why we strongly encourage everyone to update to a supported, secure operating system.

That said, we know that not everyone can easily switch to a newer operating system. Millions of people are still working on XP computers every day. We want those people to have the option to use a browser that’s up-to-date and as safe as possible on an unsupported operating system. We previously announced that we’d keep supporting Chrome on Windows XP through ‘at least’ April 2015. It’s April 2015 now, and we’re extending that commitment. We will continue to provide regular updates and security patches to Chrome on XP through the end of 2015.

People tell us they love their Chromebooks. Yet, you have to use a trackpad, type URLs and Search queries using a keyboard, and click on links. Google’s top research scientists have calculated that the average person burns up to five calories per day by clicking on web links. This is absurd—these calories could be put to much better use for breathing, pranking a co-worker, or cleaning your bathtub.

Well, a rogue team of engineers set out to solve one of mankind’s top problems and re-rethink computing. Today, we’re excited to announce a way to make your Chromebook self-browsing.

With just one click, you’re off surfing the web—no input needed. And what can you do once your Chromebook is self-browsing? The possibilities are endless:

Plan your summer vacation to Qikiqtarjuaq

Fall in love using your new automated online dating profile

Write this blog post

Earn high scores in every online game

Post random status updates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

Manage your finances at whim

Run for President

Pen the next best-seller (Is your favorite author using a self-browsing Chromebook? We'll never know)

We’ve been testing this new functionality for weeks, browsing the whole web from classifieds to news, music to cat photos -- and now, these Chromebooks are responsible for the majority of ALL CAPS comments on the web. In total, our self-browsing Chromebooks have logged more than 5 million pageviews without once heading here.

The first version of our self-browsing software is now available at this very easy to remember link: http://goo.gl/1Htv4S. Give it a shot—then sit back, relax, and watch the future unfold. This is the last link YOU will ever click.